Penn State has recently signed a license agreement with online training leader lynda.com, making thousands of online video tutorials on hundreds of information technology topics available at no cost to University faculty, staff, and students. To access the new service, visit http://its.psu.edu/training/lynda/ and click on the lynda.com Penn State access page.
According to Chris Lucas, director of ITS Training Services, Penn State faculty will be able to use the tutorials in numerous ways.
"Instructors can use the service to help their students learn the technology skills they need to complete their course work," he said. "Faculty want to teach concepts around a project, not the technologies themselves. Penn State’s lynda.com site license makes this possible by giving students a free and accessible resource for learning those critical technology skills."
The tutorials also are available for professional development needs and self-paced learning. University staff can peruse the vast array of software topics any time and can sign up for online courses on Microsoft Office applications, Photoshop, 3-D animation, Dreamweaver, Flash, audio/video editing applications, operating systems and hundreds of other subjects.
Tracy Thompson, a graduate student in instructional systems, has been regularly using the tutorials to complete her coursework.
“The lynda.com tutorials were a huge help to me in my Design Studio course," she said. "Our first assignment required using software I'd never used, and without lynda.com, I wouldn't have been able to finish the project on time."
Thompson said she appreciated the link to the lynda.com tutorials her professor included in the Design Studio course syllabus, which made it possible to access the video she needed immediately.
According to Kevin Morooney, vice provost for information technology, the new service was first launched during the fall semester to allow team members to carefully monitor functionality and performance.
"Since Penn State has very unique training needs as a university, we wanted to work closely with the staff at lynda.com to eliminate any potential bugs and devise a site license that fits our community's pedagogical and academic interests," Morooney said.
To make the service as efficient as possible, the University also worked with lynda.com to design a "single sign-on" access solution that enables students, faculty, and staff to use their Penn State Access Account user IDs and passwords to log into the lynda.com system and take the tutorials at no cost.
“We had discussed hosting the content at Penn State, but then we would have to constantly be updating and loading new content onto the servers,” said Lucas. “The single sign-on solution saves Penn State a tremendous amount of time and resources.”
Lucas said it didn’t take long for other universities to take advantage of the new sign-on feature. Duke University, Indiana University and Miami University (among others) already have begun using the university-wide site license with a single sign-on solution, much like Penn State’s model.
“I think this site license agreement has opened a lot of doors by providing another option to the training ITS traditionally offers. Students who take advantage of technology training while they’re here at Penn State also can use the skills to become more marketable when they enter the work force,” Lucas said. He also stressed that the tutorials are available for University staff at all locations to use at their convenience, potentially saving travel time and money.
“I think we can now say, through this service, we’re better meeting the training needs of the University. Overall, I think that is very positive,” said Lucas.